To win one gold medal is impressive. To win two indicates a certain relentlessness. To win four in the space of one remarkable week of athletics may ensure further recognition for Amy Hunt as the BBC’s sports personality of the year. Ms Hunt’s record‑breaking achievement in winning the 100m, 200m, women’s relay and mixed relay at the first European championships to be held in Britain was an exhibition of world-class sprinting for the ages.
Her triumph capped a week which reminded us that there is more to sporting life than football. By winning an 11th medal, Dina Asher-Smith became the most successful athlete in the history of the competition. And on Friday, at a packed Alexander athletics stadium in Birmingham, the crowd savoured a contest and burgeoning rivalry that recalled the halcyon days of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett. Audrey Werro, the young Swiss star, and Keely Hodgkinson, Team GB’s Olympic champion, produced a thrillingly intense women’s 800m final, which Werro won with a time that broke a European record set in 1982.
Athletics fans should relish the moment. The walls are closing in as another Premier League season begins, sucking the oxygen of publicity away from rival sports. An expanded World Cup, and the fallout from plans to sell a stake in the competition to private equity, made it seem as if football never went away. But it has been a stellar couple of months for British athletes.
Josh Kerr’s shattering of the one-mile world record, in front of 60,000 spectators at July’s London Diamond League meet, was the sporting event of the summer until Hunt arguably trumped it. There was also a successful salvage operation in Scotland. Glasgow’s staging of the Commonwealth Games at short notice, after the original Australian hosts pulled out, rescued the event from limbo.
The only downside was that the rich talent on display did not, at times, get the fanfare it deserved. Glasgow’s efforts went somewhat under the national radar after cost-conscious organisers rejected a low offer from the BBC and sold rights to the Discovery channel. The boost that terrestrial coverage can give was shown by an audience estimated to be in the region of 4 million for the epic runoff between Werro and Hodgkinson.
Birmingham, however, has had its own problems as cameras panned across acres of empty seats in the early part of last week. The former athlete and BBC commentator Steve Cram has been among those to question high ticket prices, and there was a notable lack of cut-price deals to attract the next generation of athletics fans. The promotion and marketing of the event in Birmingham itself, in stark contrast with the 2022 Commonwealth Games, was somewhat underwhelming.
For a sport which can produce such scintillating moments of concentrated drama, and in which male and female athletes enjoy a genuine equality of esteem, that is a shame. British athletics is enjoying a golden era, and sassy personalities such as Hunt – a Cambridge graduate who once described herself as “an academic badass and a track goddess” – have a charismatic appeal.
The chosen motto of the London 2012 Olympics was “Inspire a generation”. As the likes of Hunt, Hodgkinson and Kerr do just that, more can be done to support and promote their efforts. Football may now be back. But Britain’s stars of track and field jumped through their annual summer window of opportunity to stunning effect.
